“Stop!” Sky shouted. For he had perceived what I was just now noticing—a subtle, gravitational force drawing us in. Tempting us, luring us closer.Fall, it seemed to say.Fall in.
Kuro’s horse bucked with agitation. The rebel leader tried to calm him, but the animal clearly wished to run. We’d planned to remain on horseback as we worked, to enable a quick getaway. But now I wondered if a getaway was simply wishful thinking.
“We should dismount,” I told Kuro, as he lurched forward on his horse. “We’ll need our concentration.”
Sky looked furious at this, but he had the sense not to argue. “Don’t go any closer to the edge,” he warned me.
I dismounted clumsily, landing on one foot. Sky’s horse was much taller than I was used to, and gravity did not seem to function properly here, as if up and down had somehow reversed. A wave of déjà vu washed over me. Were we nearing the in-between realm, the place where I’d fought Chancellor Sima at the end of the war? Could that have been the start of the rift, when we’d begun to blur the borders between realms?
Lost in thought, I barely noticed the saber-toothed bird that flew from the chasm, her wings slicing through the air as she dove toward me. At her vicious screech, I threw my arms over my head—but the blow never came. Sky’s iron-tipped arrow had already struck, lodging deep in the bird’s side.
I gaped at Sky. “Thank you,” I said breathlessly.
He nodded, fitting another arrow in place. “Do what you need to do.”
Another boom shook the earth from afar. What was Lei up to? But I could not afford to think about him right now. Closing my eyes, I channeled my qi through my core, releasing any errant worries. When I opened my eyes, Sky’s soldiers had formed a small clearing around us.
Only Kuro was left beside me.
Tentatively, I held out a spirit fossil from the Reed Flute Caves. “Ready?” I asked him.
Kuro grinned, positively buzzing with anticipation. He wrapped his hand around mine, so that we both grasped the spirit fossil. At once, I felt our life forces merge, the essence of him bleeding into me.
“See you on the other side, Phoenix-Slayer.”
As one, we left behind our bodies, our spirits entering the site of the rift like petals floating along a river current. I recognized the feeling of the in-between realm now, the way it entrapped qi and lixia, the way it allowed for both human emotion and spirit detachment.
Kuro’s qi centered me like an effusive embrace. Perhaps hewasa reincarnation of the Great Warrior, for his qi was like nothing I’d ever known. I could not feel the limits of it; I could not sense where his life force ended and Baihu’s lixia began. The first embers of hope stirred within me. With my gift for compulsion and Kuro’s boundless qi, perhaps we stood a chance.
Perhaps there could be a happy ending to our story.
I intertwined our energies together. Just as I was deficient in earth and wood, Kuro lacked water and fire. Our metal was the strongest, both of us surging with excess. Together we cycled through our combined elements—wood, fire, earth, metal, water—and then I began to impel.
I drew on my own memories at first, finding comfort in the familiar. “Remember yourself,” my mother had told me. “Remember your humanness, and you will be able to return.”
Remember what you have to live for.
I was five years old again, spying on my mother instead of practicing my penmanship. Through the rice paper screen I watched asmy mother bathed with her best friend, a woman she’d known since girlhood. The two were lovely together, contradictions of sharp angles and soft curves.
“Let me braid your hair,” said my mother, kissing the back of her neck. Her friend said something in reply, and my mother laughed, a sound like silver bells. Even in those early days, I rarely heard my mother laugh.
“You have a talent for kung fu,” Uncle Zhou was saying. I was thirteen and training with him in the woods behind our house. “Yours is a rare, extraordinary gift.”
My penmanship was crude, my embroidery an embarrassment, and my ability to play the erhu nonexistent. This was the first time I’d been told I was good at something.
I reached for my first meeting with Xiuying, but Kuro’s memories pressed at the edges of my consciousness. I let him in, and together we directed his memories toward the veil.
I felt his exhilaration as if it were my own, watching as he beat up the town bully, despite being the shortest boy in his class. Watching as he celebrated his thirteenth birthday, and at last began to grow.And grow.
“What do you feed him?” the neighbors asked his grandmother, as he grew five inches each year.
“He’s destined for greatness, that one,” his grandmother replied, puffing out her chest with pride.
I watched the day he met Jinya, when she beat him in a game of cuju, despite being half his size. His initial scorn shifted into unwavering admiration. From then on he followed her everywhere like a lost puppy, though she would not give him the time of day. Even when other girls flirted with him, even when he won the affection of her sisters and brother, still she ignored him.
Late one evening Kuro was returning home from the fieldswhen he heard sounds of a commotion. Never one to run from danger, he hurried toward the raised voices and caught sight of Jinya arguing with a big-city constable.
“If you’re hiding her here, you know that’s illegal,” the constable warned.
